Jan Pienkowski's Nut Cracker: grim tales

Louise Carpenter

12:01AM GMT 01 Dec 2008

Jan Pienkowski's new children's book explores the dark side of the Nutcracker story. Louise Carpenter discovers that the shadows cast by the illustrator's enchanting silhouettes can be traced back to Warsaw, 1944

Jan Pienkowski remembers exactly when the muse struck for his new book, a sumptuous and eccentric visual interpretation of The Nutcracker. Last summer he found himself among a convention of goths gathered in Leipzig. 'The goths were dressed entirely in black with sharp buckles and spikes everywhere and their hair standing in points,' Pienkowski says. 'They looked so elegant and yet so extraordinary at the same time. It came to me immediately. After all, Drosselmeier really is quite frightening.'

It is not surprising that what inspired Pienkowski might also appeal to the darker side of a child's imagination - more than 30 years ago Pienkowski had introduced British children to their first proper pop-up book with the award-winning Haunted House, a scary visual journey through a house full of spooks, where Dracula sleeps with his fangs in a glass. There had also been the internationally successful Meg and Mog, the story of a clumsy witch and her cat, which has since made it on to both stage and screen.

Pienkowski realised the story of The Nutcracker could be drawn in a way that was not as we have come to know it - all sugary sweet like the Tchaikovsky ballet. It became clear that his portrayal could be dark and magical, reflecting the much scarier tale first written in German in 1816 by ETA Hoffmann. And so, in Nut Cracker, a new version of the story translated by David Walser (Pienkowski's lifelong partner) and published in time for Christmas, a gothic Godfather Drossel­meier has been born, complete with spiked hair and biker boots. The figures are drawn entirely in silhouette, and placed on elaborate sparkled backgrounds created by high-tech printing using a particular kind of glue. The style follows on from the phenomenally successful The Fairy Tales (2005) and The Thousand Nights and One Night (2007), for which Pienkowski and Walser attracted spectacular reviews. This time, the book's finale goes one step further, with a multi-layered boxed tableau of intricate laser-cut silhouettes in the style of traditional German papercraft, which Pienkowski first encountered as a terrified child in a bomb shelter during the 1944 Warsaw uprising. 'I remember a soldier using nail scissors to cut figures out of paper to entertain us children,' he says. 'There is a great tradition of it across middle Europe.'

Bound in gold and covered in red sparkly glitter, the book feels like a piece of discovered treasure. And yet according to Pienkowski and Walser its technical achievements were nothing compared with the problems of evoking the true spirit of the original Hoffmann tale while marrying it to a few of the entirely unauthentic but intrinsic elements of the ballet. 'After all,' Pienkowski explains, 'the ballet is how people know it, particularly little girls.'

'I would say we have been 95 per cent true to the Hoffmann,' adds Walser, who worked meticulously on the relatively short text for a year.

For the uninitiated, The Nutcracker ballet tells the story of a young girl called Clara whose god­father, Herr Drosselmeier, gives her a nutcracker doll on Christmas Eve. That night, at midnight, Clara comes down to check on the doll, to find it has come to life along with the other toys. The room fills with mice, led by the Mouse King. A war breaks out. Clara hits the Mouse King with a slipper, giving victory to the Nutcracker, and he turns into a prince. The pair travel through the branches of the Christmas tree and through a winter landscape. The second act has them arriving in the Land of Sweets, where their tale is described to the Sugar Plum Fairy and elaborate dances follow.

In Hoffmann's - and Pienkowski's - version the tale takes place over several nights and is far more complicated and menacing. The story of the war of the mice is told by Drosselmeier himself, perched on top of a clock with his cloak spread out behind him like wings. The tale he tells is of a time when he was clockmaker to the royal palace. In an act of revenge on the King and Queen for the murder of her seven sons, the Mouse Queen turns the royal baby, Princess Pirlipat, into a shrivelled creature with piercing eyes and a mouth 'like a gash from ear to ear'. The only way of lifting the spell on the Princess is to find a boy capable of cracking a Krakatuk nut. The boy who can crack the nut turns out to be Drosselmeier's nephew, but as he lifts the curse on the Princess it falls on him, and he in turn is changed into a shrivelled creature with a wide mouth - a nutcracker. The only way for Drossel­meier's nephew to be restored is to kill the Mouse Queen's seven-headed son, born after the deaths of her other sons. The battle that ensues is the beginning of the ballet as we know it.

'There was a bit at the end of the German original when the nutcracker becomes a real man, introduced to Clara and her family, and then suddenly starts walking around the drawing-room cracking nuts with his teeth,' Walser says. 'I thought this rather far-fetched and sinister so I cut it out. But when I told a seven-year-old girl I'd cut it, she was so disappointed. Children like that kind of dark complexity, you see.'

We are sitting on the terrace of the vast south-west London villa that Pienkowski has shared with Walser since the 1960s. The garden is bathed in autumn sunshine and is crammed with pretty trees, climbers and the planted vegetables that make the pair almost self-sufficient. Guests are encouraged to hand-pick runner beans and raspberries for lunch. It is a scene of near domestic bliss, but as in Nut Cracker, scratch the surface and there lies beneath the darker story of Pienkowski's early life in Poland and its impact on him and his work.

Jan Pienkowski was eight when the Warsaw uprising began in 1944. His minor aristocratic family had already been displaced from their estate by the outbreak of war in 1939, when he and his mother, aunt and cousins had been forced to travel overland in a horse and cart. By the time of the uprising, a Polish revolt that was met by a barbaric and inhumane German response (women and children were shot and maimed, people were hanged from balconies), Pienkowski's father had already gone into hiding as one of the orchestrators of an underground resistance movement. 'He just disappeared one day,' Pienkowski says, his eyes filling with tears. 'I got a toy train in the post wrapped in brown paper. It was from him but I didn't want it. I didn't understand, you see. The fact that he went and didn't come back was an enormous piece of terror for me.'

His father returned much later, leaving Pienkowski, an only child, to experience the terror and violence of the uprising with his very practical, scientific mother. Wartime had, perversely, been pleasant, with the family living on a farm in the manner of the Middle Ages. This served to make his father's disappearance and the uprising yet more traumatic. Pienkowski's memories of that short time of his life are clear: the systematic destruction of the city; lying in trenches dug under trains; watching a small girl being lifted high in the air from freight carriage to carriage as evacuees desperately tried to find her mother; sitting in a bombed-out garage watching the field hospital opposite burn to the ground. 'It was like napalm,' he says. 'The pavements were on fire, the wretched men, the nurses. I remember it as if it were yesterday, but not the screams, the terrible noise. I've shut that out, but it was the only thing that really got my mother down.'

It is the insecurity of this period that has subliminally influenced much of Pienkowski's work. Even in some of the most childish stories, uncertainty is never far from the surface. 'Perhaps because I had unpleasant memories, I had sublimated them and put them into my books.'

This is seen most vividly in Haunted House, in which the final page shows an attic scene including a doll with one eye, a box of ammunition, a chainsaw and the goggles of a gas mask. 'Much later, when as a young man I used to go to hospitals and draw the bodies donated to science, it never shocked me,' he says. 'I suppose because I'd seen maimed people with missing arms and legs in Poland.'

When the war was over, Pienkowski's family travelled to Italy and then in 1946, when Pienkowski was 10, they took up an offer from the British government to emigrate to England, settling first in Herefordshire and then in Notting Hill, London. 'My father had met an Englishman who recommended a prep school in the North,' he says. 'I did not speak one word of English when I went there, but it worked. Within a year I was fluent.'

Once in London, having passed the 11-plus, he attended the Cardinal Vaughn school in Holland Park, and from there gained a place to read classics at King's College, Cambridge, where he shared a staircase with EM Forster. 'It was like an earthly paradise,' he remembers. 'Forster was painfully shy, as was I, and his room was like a magician's cave, food and books everywhere covered in a coating of dust because the cleaners had been instructed not to touch anything.'

Pienkowski had been attending life-drawing classes at a painter's studio from the age of 13, but it was at Cambridge that he found his metier, designing theatre sets and posters. It was here, too, that he was to form a lifelong friendship with Angela Holder, who would become his agent and artistic and business partner.

After coming down from Cambridge, his design career took off. He secured a job in an advertising agency and in 1962 met David Walser. 'I suppose I could have talked to my parents about it,' he explains, sighing heavily, 'but I didn't choose to. There was a regret on my parents' side, especially for my father, but they were very respectful of our relationship. We certainly made no secret of it.'

Pienkowski can count the number of 'proper' jobs he has had on one hand - working in advertising, designing book jackets for the publishing giant Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape, editor/

picture editor of a political magazine - but always in the background was the increasingly successful greetings-card company he set up after Cambridge with Holder. Walser, himself part German and an accomplished Oxford-educated linguist, became a partner in the company and manager in charge of sales. One day, at a chance visit to a small village hall in Bristol, Walser made a breakthrough. 'He came home and said I've found this extraordinary woman. Her name is Beryl Cook and she is very talented,' Pienkowski recalls. 'I think we discovered her at the same time as her gallery.'

Cook came on board and Gallery Five became so successful that it was made a limited company (Pienkowski retired from the board 10 years ago). 'She was so shy and modest,' he says of his old friend Cook, who died in May. 'She would never come to lunch or dinner if we invited her - it was too much for her.' By the late 1960s Pienkowski and Walser were living together in the large double-fronted villa that remains their home today. 'I had designed some paper bags for an entrepreneur and he advanced me £10,000 to top up my mortgage,' Pienkowski says. 'I did some wallpaper for him, which ended up being incredibly successful.'

Pienkowski, it was becoming clear, was blessed with a Midas touch. Finally, Maschler offered him the chance to audition for the design commission of a full book illustration of Joan Aiken's A Necklace of Raindrops. Quite by accident, the commission gave birth to his love of drawing in silhouette. 'I had to do one drawing to get the job. I was pretty pleased with it - they were flying through the sky on a pie - but their faces were terrible. I had to leave for the presentation and on a whim, I got my brush, dipped it in Indian ink and blacked in all the figures. I drove to Bedford Square with it drying on the passenger seat beside me.'

He never looked back, winning his first Kate Greenaway award (a prestigious children's book prize) for a second Joan Aiken project, The Kingdom Under the Sea and then another Greenaway for Haunted House. To follow was Meg and Mog, which has since sold more than three million copies in Britain alone.

Pienkowski can sometimes be tempted away from book illustration. His set designs have included Beauty and the Beast for the Royal Ballet and Sleeping Beauty at Disneyland, Paris. He is responsible, too, for the Booker trophy (another Maschler commission). But now, he says, he has learnt to be choosy, citing as an example The First Noël at Chatsworth House, in which he has created five lifesize silhouette tableaux from his book of the same name to be exhibited in the chapel this Christmas. 'It is such an amazing place, I wanted to do it. But all my life I have had this terrible, horrible wish to please. Only now am I conquering it.'

He believes his new-found steeliness comes through the self-discipline of giving things up: cigarettes, following his father's painful death from lung cancer in 1985; television, after a break-in at the house; driving, after his car was stolen; and answering the telephone (too distracting now that he no longer breaks for cigarettes).

For all Pienkowski's success, there remains a fragility about him. His hands often tremble and he is brought to tears on the subject of his father. He reveals that he regularly goes on retreat in Scotland. When asked whether he is fulfilled, he says, 'We all have our jolly times. I suppose I am more moody than most and sometimes I feel everything is awful, but on the whole I am pretty fulfilled.'

He cites the government's decision to introduce civil partnership as having made a monumental impact on his life. The morning it became law, he and Walser went to Richmond register office and made official their 40-year relationship. 'That made a huge difference to me,' he says, 'a huge difference. Finally it was a recognised state in which to live as oppose to some kind of limbo.'

It is such lifelong relationships combined with his Catholic faith, particularly what he calls 'the Latinness and clubbiness of it' that have not only helped him feel safe, but have also given him, after so much early turbulence, a sense of belonging. He loves to travel but always with the knowledge of his return. Seeing the goths, he explains, appealed simultaneously to his sense of a 'club' - 'they were all dressed in the same sort of fashion' - and to his love of the extraordinary.

'You English, it takes 40 years to get to know you properly. I've just got to that point so I don't suppose I'll ever move now.

'I love this country,' he continues with obvious deep feeling. 'I feel it is mine. I never feel foreign.' He pauses. 'I do in a way, but not really.'